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The Feminist Dietitian

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Intuitive eating is a fairly hot buzz word today. It is gaining more ground with dietitians, and other health professionals world wide. All of these people are choosing to let go of regimented eating schedules that come from years of dieting, compounded with school lunch times and corporate scheduling.

But what is intuitive eating?
Intuitive eating is learning to eat based on your internal cues from your own body in real time. Instead of eating at prescribed times because you "have to". It is giving your body the listening treatment that most of us have not given it for many many years. Instead of eating first thing in the morning because "breakfast is the most important meal of the day" you may wait thirty minutes to an hour until you (and your body) are ready to eat. It is having a snack when you are hungry, instead of ignoring your bodies signals for fuel because you just ate an hour ago. It is going back to ourselves and giving our bodies and minds a safe …

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Hey, everyone! I hope your summer is going well. It has been so hot here in Louisiana, that it I'm actually happy that it's overcast today.

Anywho, as the summer starts to wind down, a lot of us are looking at a major shift in our schedule once August rolls around. For some of us that means that our children are headed off to school, or maybe you're headed back to school, work may pick up more, and we are all looking at more traffic in the morning.

When life gets busy like this it can be very difficult to continue to eat intuitively, because of all the external noise that we have to listen to. Sometimes this leads us to not eating all day until we get home for dinner, or it may lead some of us to grab some ramen noodles to microwave.

This is where meal planning can really help. It is usually done in weekly increments though if you go shopping monthly or daily it can be adjusted for that as well. I do weekly meal planning. Not only do…

Thin privilege has become part of our cultural vernacular more and more in the past two to three years. It has been controversial, and lots of people like to declare that it doesn't exist, or that "thin people face discrimination too!"
Well, I'm here to let you know that thin privilege is totally real, and I know it is because I experience it. I have experienced it my entire life.
I have always been on the thinner side, and even when I was technically considered "overweight" I was still passing for thin, meaning I did not look obviously overweight or fat, so I still experienced the privilege that comes from "passing" as thin.
I always knew there were people of different sizes. I had some friends that were larger than me and some friends that were smaller. But I never felt hurt about the fat jokes I heard from television, or from the adults around me, or the jokes that elementary and middle school kids like to tell, because I knew it didn't…

Every year over 20% of Americans set weight loss as their goal. At any given moment over 50% of Americans either want to lose weight or are actively trying to lose weight. I've done it, and statistically, you have done it as well.

This has been pretty steady with minor rises and falls over the years, typically spiking around New Years (as anyone who has ever been to a gym can attest to). This continues despite evidence that weight is not as correlated to health as we want to believe, and the continuous waves of evidence citing that dieting and long term weightloss just is not possible for the majority of the population. While we can lose weight, most of us will regain weight after two years, sometimes even gaining more weight than what we originally lost. Despite all of this, we continue with setting weight loss goals for ours…

I've struggled a lot with getting older. I'm not implying that my age is too old, but rather I have struggled with the changes, mental and physical that come from getting older.

The first big change came when I decided to start taking medication for my anxiety, something I had never done before. I had always handled it before with counseling, books, and self-treatment. But I finally decided that I had reached a point in my life where medicine made sense. I had graduated from college and I was trying to move into the professional business world, and I realized that crying in the bathroom five times a day during a really low mental day for me would not do me any favors in the corporate world. With that decision came a lot of decisions that I never expected to have to make.

With my medication I cannot drink like I did in college. I used to be able to get good and drunk at parties over the weekend, I knew when to start drinking water so that I didn't get sick, and had a goo…

Many of us have grown up being told to "clean our plates" to not waste food, and even to continue eating food to the point of physical discomfort to get "our money's worth".

For many of us, this is a cornerstone of our disordered eating behaviors as adults. For some people this manifests as bulimia, excessive exercise, or simply the guilt and shame that accompanies our painfully full stomach.

So how can we battle this?

I think a good place to start is to confront our concept of "waste", especially in regards to food. Not finishing a meal, a snack, a pint of ice cream, or a sandwich and throwing it away does not make you a soulless person. Yes, there are many people in our world that could use more food, but forcing yourself to eat food so as to not "waste" it, doesn't help those people anymore then throwing away your food. This is just another way that we moralize our food, and its another way that capitalism sneaks into our relatio…

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Tofu has been a pretty regular staple in my life for the past three to four years. I love it. I crave it. I can eat it raw, I can eat it cooked. In my book, it is very difficult to go wrong with tofu. It's versatile, riducioulsly easy to customize to any palette.

What is tofu?
Tofu is fermented soy bean paste. You start with soy milk, coagulate it and then press the curds into soft white blocks. It is a common staple in East Asian and Southeast Asian cuisine.

What are the health benefits to tofu?
Tofu is a good source of protein, and is one of the few plant based proteins that contains all eight essential amino acids. It is also a great source of calcium, iron, manganese, selenium, phosphorus, magnesium, copper, zinc and vitamin B1.

If you are attempting to lower you red meat intake, fat intake, or simply incorporate more plant based proteins into your diet, tofu is an excellent choice.